Twitter takes down tweets criticising handling of pandemic at government request | Hacker News Reader

Twitter takes down tweets criticising handling of pandemic at government request

medianama.com

196 pointsdanso45 comments

Censorship in India isn't new. The usual modus operandi is to shutdown the internet. 4G mobile services were banned in Kashmir for 550 days [0]. The objective is largely to control the dissemination of news.

The government had recently amended laws to govern social media giants including Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter [1]. These laws were introduced during the protests against the farm laws when government had requested Twitter to take down a number of accounts:

> The new rules come on the heels of a tense standoff between Twitter and the Indian government. Twitter reinstated several accounts that the government had ordered it to take down for using what it called "incendiary and baseless" hashtags related to farmers protesting against new agricultural reforms. The platform ultimately took down hundreds of accounts and partially restricted others, but drew a line by refusing to block accounts of journalists, activists and politicians.

The public policy directory at Facebook had opposed applying the company’s hate-speech rules to a politician from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party who had in posts called Muslims traitors [2].

> The WSJ article said Das had told staff that applying hate-speech rules to politicians close to Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “would damage the company’s business prospects in the country.”

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/india-restores-4...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/25/tech/india-twitter-facebo...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-india-exclusive-...

Its high time, a slow, authoritarian resistant, mesh net infrastructure standard is developed, were travelling people become the data carriers for requests from cut off regions. Nobody knows what s/he carries, and it can only be decrypted by the receiver.

Routing could be done by likelihood of organization association. Organizations are cellphone-proximity structures, formed by popular vote of each member validated with its history.

If you claim to regularly fly to hongkong, somebody on a busstation might transfer to your phone via BT a encrypted documentation, all even with plausible deniability, if part of the meshnet is a friendly virus. If your behaviour does not correspond to your actual behaviour, it gets written as a sink into a public ledger.

Imagine the data-organism taking shape in such a mesh-net. Classes in a university are constituted by the lecturer joining the class, the ever changing setup in a bus is constituted by the bus-driver.

Its like providing a reliable behaviour prediction, makes you a reliable routing predictor for the data hoping from phone to phone. I predict three hops to the train-station, near a household router, which is regularly in contact with X.

https://apnews.com/article/366a717b2c1b9a677fcbd533e9b225c2

Read this. These guys had to actually smuggle their photos out of the area because the oppressive government would not have let them otherwise. These powerful photos are a reminder to what a nation state can do to suppress dissent but as you can see, defiance is on an another level

The Indian government has proven time and again that it is no friend of an open and uncensored internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India

Twitter has proven time and again that it is no friend of an open and uncensored platform.

Any company is expected to operate under the laws of the land it does business in. Twitter is not the culprit here.

Yes they are. Twitter is the culprit to the extent that they don't value free expression. If they valued it in the way it is meant in the US then they would allow their users to criticize their government. If the government says that's illegal then Twitter should not do business there.

Obviously, for Twitter, it's a business decision. They don't care about free expression and do care about making money, so they censor Indians (and others) and comply with censorious regimes.

It may not have been Twitter's idea to censor. Left to their own devices they might prefer to censor nothing. However, it is certainly Twitter's action to censor people and they are fully culpable for that.

Companies shouldn't be middlemen in the position to control speech in the first place. The entire webapp ecosystem is an attractive nuisance designed to disempower users in favor of extracting ongoing rent.

Significant clarifying detail: At the request of the Indian government and in India.

For everyone talking about the Streisand Effect, I don’t think it is applicable anymore in the age of centralized social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Can anyone point to an information or post that was censored by Twitter and/or Facebook and really took off in a huge way?

I think censorship these days is pretty effective, if you can get Twitter and Facebook on board.

Way to go Indian Govt! Now you get to see the Streisand effect in all of its glory as you try to burn bodies & still hold political rallies.

Not really, this will be swept under the rug by creating a new BS completely unrelated to the current issue at hand.

And people will forget this in a week.

In other news, Twitter takes down tweets criticizing their handling of taking tweets down at the request of their PR team. /sarcasm.

Welcome to 1984.

> /sarcasm

How would you know? I suppose encoded/improperly spelled messages would get through some of the time.

It's amusing that in the US, the people who are most upset about this are largely the same people who argue most strenuously for Twitter to do more censorship.

This isn’t reddit, expand on this point.

I'm guessing: The people who supported censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story are probably also against this particular instance of censorship.

I think it's probably a broader reference to the American left's slide towards embracing censorship, of everything from ostensible misinformation to an ever-expanding definition of "violent speech".

Though I don't really follow why the commenter thinks that the American right would be more OK with India censoring discussion of the pandemic. "Big tech censoring discussion of the pandemic" is a pretty hot-button issue on the right currently.

If someone supports censorship of fake news, it does not automatically imply that they also support the censorship of facts.

Like why is it even the governments business to go curate a public image. If there is a false statement, make a statement about it don't infringe on rights of your citizens or non-citizens.

It's the fundamental difference between an Authoritative govt & a democratically elected one.

I hope after the whole pandemic goes away (whenever that is), these issues of suppression are thoroughly investigated to find out who is behind muffling voices/criticism.

Notably, none of the tweets taken down are by members of the ruling party. They have been promoting misinformation and quackery.

It isn't surprising but this is getting to be the last straw. Twitter is poison.

I think it's great. Twitter allows people to communicate relatively openly. The alternative is to have all communications run through a censor filter.

Lol, I hope that's /s. Unless you're in India or somewhere where Twitter bows down to censorship.

The alternative is decentralization. You don't have to prefer one master over another.

This.

But not federation.

Something like a free as in no fee blockchain that's immutable but appendable.

Messages can have revisions/retractions by original author, authority messages and statements by govts or the DAO. Items could also be flagged for things like nsfw, child porn, etc.... Being immutable it can't be deleted... But the sites and apps displaying can filter out nsfw or child porn etc...

Then the liability is on the individual web or mobile app displaying the tweet...

Tldr: you can say anything. Nobody can remove it, not even you, you can only append to it. So if you don't want it on your permanent record don't say it. If you messed up though you can add a revision. As can the DAO board and maybe country authorities...

The real scandal is US not exporting enough vaccines and vaccines materials while sitting on stockpiles sufficient to meet domestic demand many times over. Everything else is just noise

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/04/why-the-us-still-can...

It is not the US govt fault that the Indian govt is incompetent.

This will come to other countries with most of the west calling for censorship of the internet.

Yep, and they already do it voluntarily in the US.

if you get in bed with a government then maintaining a relationship with that government is more important than worrying about their form of due process

unless another part of the government tries to say you can't take all the business, of course

Suggest headline edit to say: “..at India government request”

Nothing new in the "new India". People of India sort of deserve what's happening to them, for they voted for a fascist.

Careful where this "sort of deserve" talk goes.

(Germans voted for the Nazis. [1])

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/fact-or-fiction-adolf-hitler-won-an-el...

Not applicable in this case. Modi did win and that too by a thumping majority over the Hindutva doctrine.

Ah. A political party can always win by misleading people. Does that mean misled people "deserve" everything that happens to them?

Not to mention that choice was between two equally corrupt parties each with their own flaws. But people could've seen what Modi has done after first 5 years period.

Nah...you forgetting that Modi was a genocidal figure banned by US for entry when he became the PM.

There is no comparison between Mr Singh a world renowned economist and RSS stooge Modi, and people choose their fate because of Muslim hate.

To be fair, the previous ruling party was nepotistic, and everybody knew actual power was with Nehru family. As much as current government does majority appeasement they did minority appeasement. Both are wrong.

Congress failed because of nepotism and incompetency, and they failed the nation with them. It's their fault as well.

We've banned you for this. You can't do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Good job Twitter... get down to their level.

I get censoring calls for violence and insurgency...

Like at the capitol... Though to be honest idiots at the capitol were stupid many posting their crimes and social media leading to their arrest.

Social media needs decentralized with community based censoring let govts police their citizens if they want but leave the content up with disclaimers and such.

I think it's more damaging for shady politicians, criminals, etc if their tweets were permanent and there were no delete button...

You could add revisions/retractions but can't pretend it was never said by erasing.

Sounds good in theory but in practice, if you want to operate in a particular country,you need to abide by the laws of that country. That is what Apple stores all Chinese iCloud data within China and hands over the iCloud encryption keys to the government .

Free speech is not that free in other parts of the world .

My point is if it is truly decentralized... As in blockchain or distributed db... Without transaction fees of course...

And it's immutable. As in nothing can be deleted. Admins and authorities could probably block display because that's delivered via api, but all messages remain on blockchain or whatever permanently.

Addendums could be allowed maybe... From site admins for just that site, DAO team for a sub data item that's linked and always shows with it, or the user themselves could add a retraction, correction, etc... Say under penalty of torture...

But the original message and every revision/addendum is public record...

Any site pulling from the fire hose can decide which parts of the api to display or they could filter blocked items individually...

If there's something really bad like media links to child porn those could be flagged so sites could perma block them....

But all the data is decentralized and ran by a DAO, with a purposes of ensuring transparency in social media.

It's interesting to see them fully removed, rather than adding a disclaimer. I predict that the disclaimers that sites like YouTube have implemented in an effort to fight misinformation are not that effective, especially among users who already have a tendency to distrust platforms/government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com